"Which one is the starter? Which one is the desert (sic)?" ...the incriminating in-flight meal

"To make wail and lament for one's ill fortune, when one will win a tear from the audience, is well worthwhile," wrote Aeschylus some 2,400 years before man learned how to fly in metal birds. What applied in ancient Greece still holds today, particularly when those tears are of laughter.

One anonymous lamenter has tugged at the tears-of-laughter ducts in a missive to Richard Branson, which appeared on the popbitch website a few days ago, about the state of the food - and the entertainment - provided on a Virgin flight from Mumbai to Heathrow in December last year.

The anonymous complainant's descriptions of "sour gel" that looked like custard and was "so alien to my palette (sic) that it took away the taste of the curry emanating from our miscellaneous central cuboid of beige matter" are worth reading in full on the popbitch website. But what really elevates the letter is the use of supporting evidence: seven photographs they claim were taken on the flight.

These exhibits - and their all-too-recognisable horrendousness - take the letter into quasi-legal territory. (If it wasn't so humorous I'd suspect the complainant was a lawyer.) You can almost imagine this letter leading to the offending airline meals being produced in some heavenly court of your dreams, with Branson shackled to the dock, pleading for the integrity of his business empire.

When you have a gripe, we all know you should, as our lamenter did, complain to the top man, or woman. But we can only read and learn from the case of the custard cuisine. Like most Britons, I complain so rarely that when I finally explode I lose all sense of humour and end up sounding both timid and insufferably self-righteous. These days, however, fury and green ink are not enough: you need jokes and supporting evidence.

It seems to have worked. According to reports, Sir Richard Branson telephoned the author of the letter and had thanked him for his "constructive if tongue-in-cheek" email. (Which rather makes one wonder if the circulation of this email of complaint around the world is actually another cunning ruse from Virgin's masterful media team.)

Complaining should be part of the national curriculum. In the interests of equipping ourselves better to tackle the horror of airline food - or any other bane of contemporary life - why don't we share our tips and experiences? And if you've got any particularly funny or successful letters you are happy to reproduce, why not publish them here? It's what Aeschylus would have wanted.